Rooting in Taihape

In an email today from a Quote Unquote reader who remembers this post about the world’s worst tourism slogans:

By the way, on the subject of branding towns in NZ, we passed through Taihape and bought some plants from a shop called “Born in Taihape”. The sub headline of the shop was, wait for it: “Thoroughly rooted”.

British is best

I always think that Australian politics is so much better than ours. It is bigger, ruder, faster and let’s face it, more important.

But English politics is better still. The End Of The Party, a new book by journalist Andrew Rawnsley, details stories about PM Gordon Brown’s rages. According to the Daily Mail:

Mr Rawnsley was responsible for revealing that an unnamed senior adviser to Mr Blair said Mr Brown had ‘psychological flaws’. The Mail on Sunday later reported that the adviser was Mr Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell.

Look who’s talking. And then:

One of his books described how Labour's welfare reforms were wrecked by the bitter feud between Harriet Harman and Frank Field.
In one exchange, Ms Harman said: ‘I can’t work with someone who thinks I’m a liar.’
Mr Field replied: ‘And I can’t work with someone who’s a ******* liar.’

It all makes Helengrad or the Key d’Orsay look very mild.

Charlie Brooker on how to report the news

In the vein of the metablogs mentioned on Thursday, here is Charlie Brooker on BBC’s Newswipe with a satiric news clip showing how news clips are made:

Blue moon

Tonight there is a blue moon – there was a rose moon on 1 January and a blue moon tonight. That’s what the first and second full moons in a months are called. They are not rare, but as they come only every two or three years they are not common.

And nor is Cybill Shepherd, seen here singing the Rodgers and Hart standard “Blue Moon” in a scene from Moonlighting with Bruce Willis pretending to be Dizzy Gillespie:

To Auckland and back

That was my day.

See, there is always someone worse off than yourself.

Steve Meier and Transpower

An Auckland friend emails:

Please make sure the trees on your property aren’t interfering with my electricity supply.

This, South Islanders and international readers, is what he is referring to, if you will excuse the split infinitive:

Power was lost to more than 50,000 Auckland and Northland homes, traffic lights were out, and some businesses were forced to close when pylons sparked a fire in trees on a Waikato property about 4pm.
The fire caused a fault on two of the transmission lines that feed the region. With the Otahuhu power station out of action for maintenance, Transpower declared a grid emergency and called on electricity retailer Vector to reduce pressure on the network by implementing rolling outages.
Transpower and Vector both said this afternoon there would be no compensation for customers.
The outage was drawn out after linesmen were barred from entering Steve Meier’s farm near Hamilton to make repairs following the fire.
The linesmen required a police escort onto the property, where police seized 11 guns and Mr Meier’s firearms licence.
Mr Meier blamed Transpower for yesterday’s cuts, saying he warned the company five years ago that a fire on his 13ha property would happen.
Transpower chief executive Patrick Strange said Mr Meier had obstructed the company when it had sent staff to trim the trees back from the pylons.
Mr Meier has fought a five-year battle, along with about 50 other landowners in the area, upset at the company’s refusal to pay for easement rights for hosting its structures.
Mr Strange said Mr Meier was the most difficult person in the country to deal with.

Yes, he is obviously a very difficult person to deal with. Some of us might say, if pushed, that he is possibly a f―ing idiot. But “the most difficult person in the country to deal with”?

I have some other candidates, and I bet you do too.

Storm warning

There was an electrical storm here in Waipa last night. It was spectacular – it went on for at least an hour and a half, and the thunder was constant for three hours or more. Not a bit of thunder and a minute later a bit more, this was constant noise. We had an hour or so without power, but it was worth it: at the storm’s height we went outside to stand in the rain to enjoy the view. The sheet lightning came every few seconds, along with – I don’t know, forked, several other types:

The storms resulted in more than 13,400 lightning strikes across the central and upper North Island last evening, with an estimated 5000 of those in the Waikato.

Then came the deluge:

Environment Waikato’s Hamilton rainfall graph showed a spike in rainfall around 10pm last night, with about 23mm of rain recorded between 6pm on Tuesday and 6am this morning. [. . .]
Last night’s storm produced bursts of heavy rain and wind, and hail was reported in Cambridge. Matangi weather enthusiast Tim Gunn . . . said his instruments had recorded 64.6mm of rain in the 24 hours to midnight last night.
“This is probably the best Waikato storm we’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s pretty damn good.”

As a result:

A Grey St couple were watching TV when they noticed water trickling down the walls of their lounge just before 9pm.
“It was absolutely pouring down. I couldn’t believe the amount of flash lightning – I’ve never seen anything like it,” the man said.
They thought they’d got through the worst of it but this morning the roof in their hallway partially gave way.
“Now there’s a bit of concern it may do it elsewhere, so it’s not ideal.”

“It’s not ideal.” I bet.

And tonight we may have a repeat:

Wild evening electrical storms lashing the Waikato are set to continue, with forecasters saying conditions are perfect for generating thunder, lightning and downpours.

Perfect indeed. Show time!

UPDATE:
Predictive blogging: after posting that I went outside to fetch the recycle bin, and already the thunder rolls. No let-up – it is a long way away at the moment, but it is constant. It will be a long night.

A green thought in a green shade

So, farewell then Jeanette Fitzsimons and welcome to Gareth Hughes, the 28-year-old “environmental advocate” who replaces her as Green list MP. Stuff asks, “Who’s this clown?”

A fair enough question. The answer is here, on the Green Party website where his profile page introduces him:

Gareth is a vegetarian and currently works for the Green Party on. . .

If the most interesting thing about him is that he is a vegetarian, we don’t need to read any more, do we? Some of my best friends are vegetarians, just as some of my best friends have beards, but in neither case is it a defining feature, or anywhere near it. Who cares what he eats? It’s what he thinks that matters.

And here he is blathering about how having a child makes him special, or his views special, or makes him care about the planet and stuff, or something. As if he wouldn’t care about these things if he was childless. As if childless people don’t care. As if. . .

It’s not to do with making hard choices between competing interests. No, it’s all about the kiddies. Aaarrgh.

Cambridge fact of the day

Cambridge University has produced more Nobel Prize-winners (87) than has France (57).

Metablog

Dim-Post quotes this brilliant self-referential blogpost by Chris Clarke at Coyote Crossing titled “This is the title of a typical incendiary blogpost”:

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom.

That’s just a small part of it. It is quite long and very funny. Amazingly, the comments are just as funny. (You don’t get that at Kiwiblog, now, do you?)

But even better, possibly, is the one that inspired Clarke, this one by Jim Henley, titled “Blog”. The post consists of one word, “Blog”. This is what follows:

1. Comment by Reader —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:10 pm
Comment.

2. Comment by Jim Henley —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:12 pm
Deadpan rejoinder.

3. Comment by Michael —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:14 pm
Oversharp disagrement based on unstated differences in paradigms.

4. Comment by Steve —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:34 pm
Bad, marginally on-topic pun.
(Parenthetical complaint regarding tags permitted in comments!)

5. Comment by Brian C.B. —
April 7, 2006 @ 9:51 pm
Egregious mspelling.

6. Comment by Eric Scharf —
April 7, 2006 @ 10:11 pm
Off-topic, self-promoting link.

7. Comment by Kevin B. O\'Reilly —
April 7, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
Nazi analogy employed; Godwin’s law invoked.
Thread over!

But there is lots more…